Hand made versus Machine made

Hand made versus Machine made

Differences between hand dipped and machine dipped.

A lot of hype these days regarding chocolates is Hand Dipped or Hand Made. Some people would like to believe that if you hand dip something it has to be better than something that is done using a machine. Take butter and margerine as an example. Butter sometimes is advertised as being hand churned, and margerine is thought of as a machine process, when in fact they are both machine processed. We all know that butter is better than margerine, and now they have discovered that margerine is in fact Bad for you because of the Trans Fatty Acids in hydrogenated vegetable oils.

Many chocolates out on the market contain Hydrogenated Oil in place of Cocoa butter. This kind of chocolate is referred to as Compound in the industry.Real chocolates contain Cocoa butter. If it does not contain Cocoa butter, it is not regarded as real chocolate.So if you hand dip something, it will not improve on it's quality. Remember the GIGO rule when you were in school? (garbage in garbage out) The difference between hand dipped and machine dipped is simple. Hand dipped candies are done one at a time; machine dipped candies are done many at a time.

When we first started Vinnielu Chocolates I started mixing caramel with a paddle by hand. Now we have a mixer to do the job. The quality of the caramel is the same. The same ingredients are used.. We use real butter instead of hydrogenated vegetable oil. Whole milk instead of powdered or reconstituted evaporated milk. This makes a high quality product.

Hand made is not better, it's more time consuming. I can't imagine the process of sugar from the sugar cane as being processed by hand.

There's nothing wrong with machine made stuff that may contain old-fashioned ingredients. A muffin factory, or a health bars are an excellent example. A health bar full of nuts and raisins, will surely get better quality control with machines that thourghly mix and cook them, rather than students that slave over a wooden spoon.